by Adam Shoalts
Still, out of purely academic interest, you might be wondering whether humans have penetrated every corner of the country. Explorers and anthropologists occasionally declare that Canada is so immense that places remain in which no humans have ever set foot. For example, the celebrated wildlife artist Robert Bateman, who has an academic background in geography, made this claim when in 2013 he was awarded the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s prestigious gold medal, the Society’s highest honour. Bateman, in his acceptance speech, recounted how in the 1950s he explored a remote section of Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula with a pair of geologists and two Inuit hunters. The hunters informed them that they had never been into the area before, nor had any member of their community. Bateman stated that they were the first humans ever to set foot there. Two other eminent geologists and cartographers at that same event spoke of their experiences hiking in parts of Canada’s wilderness where no humans had ever previously ventured. Ray Mears, a British survival expert and TV host, has similarly stated matter-of-factly that Canada’s wilderness is so vast that places remain that have never seen a human footprint. Claims like these, if nothing else, fire the imagination and encourage one’s appetite for adventure. But skeptics might well wonder if this is all just romantic wishful thinking. Perhaps it merely reflects some deep-seated human desire to believe that unexplored territory still lies beyond the horizon? An almost mythical untouched place where it is still possible to become the first human visitor? At any rate, that was my original impression on the matter as a young undergraduate. However, as I researched the topic more extensively, I was surprised to learn that most evidence favours the idea that the earth still has places no human has ever been (and not just in Antarctica). Some of these places are tucked away deep in the Canadian wilderness. To assume that each of Canada’s three million lakes, infinite number of ponds, and tens of thousands of other waterways must have been visited by someone is rather naive. (In fact, Canada has so many lakes that no geographer has ever succeeded in counting them all—three million is the currently accepted best estimate.) North America is not Europe or Asia: it was never densely populated, has been inhabited for a much shorter period of time, and has always contained vast uninhabited regions incapable of sustaining significant human populations.
The most rigorous scholarly estimates for Canada’s population before European contact put the number at a mere 200,000 to 300,000 people (compared with over 35 million today). That would give pre-contact Canada a population density of less than 0.03 people per square kilometre. With such an extremely low population density scattered over such a vast expanse of territory, it is exceedingly improbable, if not impossible, for humans to have covered all that ground in the fewer than 10,000 years most of Canada has been inhabited. Canada’s foremost expert on aboriginal history and culture, anthropologist Diamond Jenness (himself a recipient of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s gold medal), noted: “A quarter of a million people cannot effectively occupy an area of nearly four million square miles, and there were doubtless many districts seldom or never trodden by the foot of man, just as there are to-day.” Jenness thus corroborated the view that Canada’s wilderness is sufficiently vast to still contain territory unvisited by any person.
Jenness’ conclusion is more credible when one considers that those roughly 250,000 inhabitants weren’t evenly distributed across Canada. In pre-contact Canada, approximately two-thirds of all people lived in just two small areas of the country: the lush temperate rainforest of coastal British Columbia and the lower Great Lakes region of what is now southern Ontario. In the Pacific Northwest, the mild weather, abundant resources, and, above all, immensely plentiful salmon runs made it possible for a relatively large population to develop (though that population would be considered small relative to that area’s current population). The territory around the southern Great Lakes, in contrast, supported agriculture, which allowed certain aboriginal groups with cultures based on farming rather than hunting and gathering to flourish. In these regions, the first European explorers found well-established villages, well-worn portage trails, and guides who could tell them about the surrounding country and how to get from one place to another. Elsewhere it was a different story.
Almost everywhere else, Canada was very thinly populated with huge empty stretches that were uninhabited and unknown even to aboriginal people. Explorers themselves often remarked on this fact. For example, Sir Alexander Mackenzie found that in British Columbia he could follow well-worn trails made by aboriginal people, whereas in the harsh subarctic wastes where survival was infinitely more difficult, there were plenty of places his native guides could tell him nothing about. The difference is one of environment: coastal British Columbia’s more favourable geography could support a larger population, whereas the Canadian subarctic was sparsely inhabited, with a low life expectancy and periodic famines during harsh winters that could obliterate entire hunting bands. Indeed, archaeology informs us that life expectancy among pre-contact hunter-gatherers in the subarctic was extremely low, no more than mid-twenties. There were few elders to speak of. Thus, it was difficult for anything like detailed knowledge to pass from one generation to the next. Nomadic hunter-gatherers would certainly have possessed a good knowledge of the broad outlines of their hunting territories, the major rivers and lakes, heights of land, and watersheds. But within these immense districts were plenty of unknowns. Moreover, without any aid to memory in the form of a written language or maps, it was utterly impossible for any person to memorize the tens of thousands of different lakes and waterways in just one portion of Canada’s northern wilds, let alone names for even a small percentage of these landmarks. That is why even to this day, most of these lakes and waterways still have no names. To name them all would be practically impossible—several million distinct names would be required.
Population scarcity also made the nature of exploration in northern North America different from exploration in Africa, Asia, or further south, where Europeans could rely to some extent on local knowledge of an area’s geography. In contrast, explorers in Canada’s desolate wilds sometimes couldn’t find any people at all, and those they did find were often unable to tell them much about the country beyond their own territory. Often, European explorers and aboriginal guides would venture together into unexplored territory that neither group had any prior knowledge about. The subarctic forests in particular were an area with limited human populations. These immense forests, consisting chiefly of black spruce and tamarack, possess meagre nutritious resources, scarce game, and long, harsh winters. Populations in these areas were usually confined to major rivers or other water routes.
Stray far enough from a major waterway in the subarctic wilds, and there is a reasonable chance that you may find yourself in an area previously unvisited by humans. Mind you, without a time machine and in the absence of archaeological evidence, we can’t know with certainty what areas have and have not been visited by people in the distant past. That is why responsible explorers seldom make any claims on this front: they are impossible to verify and therefore meaningless. That is why, in the realm of exploration, records are essential. Just as science is about documentation and publication, exploration is similarly grounded in the publication and dissemination of maps, journals, scientific reports, books, and photographs. That is also why in explorers’ terminology, an “unexplored area” is anywhere on earth where no records exist of human exploration.
One area that stands out as exceptionally sparse on people, even by the standards of Canada’s northern wilderness—and which was soon to exercise a strange spell over me—is the massive wetland known as the Hudson Bay Lowlands. The Lowlands is one of the world’s least-explored regions—a place where bears outnumber humans, maps are often inaccurate, and rivers are so remote that they have no names in any language. Stretching across 373,700 square kilometres of desolate muskeg, stunted forest, and windswept tundra, the Lowlands is North America’s largest wetland—an Amazon of the north with t
he highest concentration of bloodsucking insects on the planet. The haunt of polar bears, wolves, wolverines, and other hardy animals, aboriginal people called the swampy Lowlands “sterile country” for its scant trees (only one-quarter of this gigantic wetland is forested) and harsh winters, preferring to remain within the confines of the boreal forest. As a result, the vast majority of the Lowlands is uninhabited and always has been. Archaeologist J.V. Wright noted that the Hudson Bay Lowlands “has produced very little evidence of prehistoric occupation by man.” In other words, it wasn’t a place anyone would choose to live.
What few hunter-gatherers there were in the Lowlands were confined to the major rivers, though it’s unclear whether they made any sustained attempt to live within this dreary swampland until the arrival of European traders on Hudson Bay and James Bay in the seventeenth century. With the establishment of fur trading forts on the mouths of the major rivers draining into Hudson Bay and James Bay, family bands settled around the forts. Others made seasonal journeys to trade at the isolated posts by following the major rivers. However, the rapid introduction of Old World diseases by European traders resulted in a huge decrease in the already minuscule aboriginal population, producing a virtually uninhabited wilderness. The few survivors managed to eke out a difficult existence into the twentieth century as fur trappers. Because the land-to-person ratio was so overwhelming, they remained largely confined to the best waterways, namely the major rivers and their large tributaries. Beyond these familiar places lay a forbidding, mysterious wilderness that Cree mythology peopled with demons, monsters such as the dreaded wendigo, and evil spirits.
Early European explorers mostly passed the area over; much of it wasn’t even mapped until the mid-twentieth century—and only then by the use of aerial photographs rather than ground surveys. This means that huge tracts of this bleak landscape, including dozens of its many thousands of rivers and creeks remain unexplored to this day. The terrain is nearly as tough as imaginable: trackless muskeg (the “quicksand of the north”); endless swamps of small, twisted spruce and tamarack trees; thousands of meandering, rock-strewn creeks and rivers; weedy lakes; impassable bogs; and millions of mosquitoes and blackflies. It is a land of mystery, where adventure beckons, nature remains unconquered, and endless wilderness stretches as far as the eye can see. So the world still does contain remote, unexplored territory and the age of exploration is not over … which is where I enter the picture. My vocation is to explore one of the world’s last great wildernesses.
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THE START OF AN OBSESSION
We live only when we adventure and give expression to the results of our adventure.
—Lawren Harris, Group of Seven, notebook, 1920s
EXPLORATION BEGINS by figuring out what you don’t know. In the spring of 2008, I was sitting in my cluttered room with a bunch of maps sprawled on the pine floor and draped across the table in front of me, looking for somewhere that I could explore. I had been there all morning sipping green tea, pondering the maps, making notes, and pacing around the room like a caged bobcat. My bookshelves were crammed with explorers’ manuscripts, old adventure novels, and volumes on geography, archaeology, history, and zoology. Well-used Ojibwa snowshoes, a prized Gränsfors Bruk axe, assorted antlers, canoe paddles, waterproof Bushnell binoculars, a brass sextant, a Brazilian machete, and a hickory walking stick occupied whatever available space there was atop the bookshelves and between them. Miscellaneous other expedition gear lay scattered about. My faithful companion, a huge Rottweiler-Shepherd mix named Riley, was sleeping on a rug in the corner, probably dreaming of rabbits.
From the maps stretched out before me, I had compiled a list of rivers in the Hudson Bay watershed—172 rivers in all, which excluded smaller streams and creeks. Then I began crossing rivers off the list if I could find anything published on them. The better known rivers, like the Missinaibi or Albany, could be stricken from the list at once. I would invariably discover—much to my disappointment—that others that seemed to hold brighter prospects had been the subject of some obscure surveying report, canoeing pamphlet, book chapter, blog post, or magazine article. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever find a single river large enough to warrant the name that had not been addressed in some medium or another. What I was after was a mystery—a hidden-away place on earth that I couldn’t learn about simply by picking up a book or looking it up on Wikipedia. I wanted something as obscure as possible—an almost unknown river with no published record of anyone exploring it. If I could find such a river, I planned to go see it for myself—the sort of old-fashioned expedition boyhood dreams are made of.
Most people who canoe rivers select ones that have detailed guide books, specialized canoeing maps, or historic explorers’ journals published about them. Such records make planning a wilderness journey—never the simplest of tasks—infinitely safer and easier. They usually allow canoeists to know what they are getting themselves into: how to access the river, how difficult it is to canoe, where suitable campsites are located, when to portage, and how long the trip should take. But people don’t make a name for themselves by following in the footsteps of others, and the easy path is generally not the most interesting. My thirst for the unknown made me an explorer, and it is the business of an explorer to venture where few if any have gone before, regardless of the difficulties. Besides, things don’t seem that difficult from the comfort of my room, with all my maps and books.
That morning, staring at the maps, I thought I had finally found what I had been looking for: a river that no one knew anything about. My fingers were tracing the vague outlines of dozens of rivers in the James Bay watershed when I hit upon one that was unlabelled on the map. The area appeared promising for an expedition: here were hundreds of waterways draining north into the brackish waters of James Bay, and then into the Arctic Ocean. The region is beyond the reach of roads and the urban sprawl-styled “civilization”: the only settlements to speak of are a few Cree communities scattered around the windswept shores of James Bay. This nameless river that had excited my interest was easily overlooked on the map because it was obscured by the artificial Ontario–Quebec boundary line. However, I soon discovered that the river had an official name by examining some of my more detailed maps and matching them with the large-scale one. Rather curiously, it was labelled the Again River—curious because “Again” is neither an aboriginal word, a surname of an explorer, nor a descriptive term like “Trout River.” How, I wondered, did this river get its name?
I scanned my bookshelf for Bruce Hodgins and Gwyneth Hoyle’s Canoeing North into the Unknown: A Record of River Travel, hoping to find the answer. This indispensable encyclopedia lists every known expedition or canoe trip down Canada’s northern rivers up to 1997, including nearly a thousand such journeys in all. Riffling through its pages, I was surprised to discover that the Again wasn’t listed in the book. Next, I lifted another volume off the shelf, Jonathan Berger and Thomas Terry’s venerable Canoe Atlas of the Little North. Published in 2007, with several dozen contributors, including geography professors, aboriginal elders, and veteran canoeists, I thought that it would surely have some information on the river. But I searched the atlas and found that this obscure Again River wasn’t even mentioned. My curiosity piqued, I went through every likely book in my library on the subject, unable to find any hint of the Again River. Even Google generated nearly nothing on the river. Aside from the Canadian government’s standard issue 1:50,000 and 1:250,000 scale topographic maps (derived largely from mid-twentieth-century black-and-white aerial photos), the only meaningful reference to the river appeared in one sentence on a government website, in a list of geographical names approved in both French and English: “Rivière Again or Again River.” That did nothing to explain the origin of the name or reveal whether an expedition had previously explored the river. When I entered the name in the government’s Geographical Names Data Base, the search results merely indicated that “Again River” had been approved in 1946, but of
fered no further clues. In contrast, the search results for other geographical names sometimes included an annotation explaining the name’s origin—such as “Mackenzie River, named after the explorer Alexander Mackenzie”—but the entry for the Again was left blank. Promising as this all seemed, I understood that many archival documents had never been digitized and that I might still locate an account of an expedition to the river if I dug deeper.
Over the following days, I did some extensive sleuthing to see if I could uncover anything further. I visited several university libraries and searched through their vast databases. At my disposal were newspaper archives dating back over a century, magazines, geographical journals, Geological Survey files, and explorers’ records. After searching through a multitude of documents, there was still nothing. Expanding my inquiry, I began to comb through tedious mineral exploration reports, which were unlikely to yield much information on the navigability of the Again River, but they might at least provide some clues to whether any expedition had ever ventured there. After a few weeks, I finally located a brief report on file with the provincial department in charge of mining that mentioned, in passing, the Again River. The geologist who had authored it had never been to the river himself. His small party had flown via helicopter to a lake southeast of the Again to do some prospecting work in 1983. But they did no canoeing, and their report contained no description of the river.
